This invention relates in general to sewing machines and in particular to a new and useful braking device for regulating the feed of a tape into the sewing machine which is operating on a garment to sew the tape thereon.
In a known brake device, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 1,277,008 an elastic tape, coming from a supply roll disposed below the sewing table plane, is supplied traversing between the fixed guide member and the brake shoe to a deflecting guide arranged before the stitch formation point of the sewing machine between the folded-over waist edge of a garment such as a skirt. The brake shoe is mounted pivotably at a fixed guide member and is pressed by a spring against the tape abutting the fixed guide member. The brake force to be applied on the tape is adjustable with a set screw, to decelerate the tape at a controlled rate relative to the folded-over cloth plies at which the cloth feeders engage from above and from below, and thereby to retain it in a selected position relative to the folded-over cloth plies, so that the plies are gathered in different degree on certain sections, which, to facilitate handling, are generally marked. For every degree of gathering or ruffling the brake force must be changed. Exact adjustment, however, is not only very time consuming, but it is also almost impossible with known devices of this kind to repeatedly find adjustments exactly enough for different degrees of gathering or ruffling.